Blockchain is the big thing right now, and every tech giant wants to dip their toe in the pond of decentralized distributed ledger. I have been a Blockchain developer for some time now, and I would talk from my experience in the industry.

This below, is the Gartner’s hype cycle for emerging technologies 2017:

According to this, Blockchain has passed the peak but would need 5–10 years to become mainstream. I am no genius, but I beg to differ. I think Blockchain tech will become mainstream much faster than expected.

Companies like JPMorgan and IBM have already developed enterprise targeted Blockchain platforms, Quorum and Hyperledger Fabric respectively. There is also Ethereum which is a public Blockchain and a development platform. In my opinion, the mainstream adoption of Blockchain technologies would depend on how fast they can solve some of the problems that it is known to face, namely Scalability and Throughput.

Scalability : Currently this is the biggest threat that Blockchain technologies face. For instance Bitcoin Blockchain is just 160 GB and it is already slow enough that a transaction takes anywhere between 3 days to weeks to get confirmed.

Throughput : This is attached to the issue of scalability. The write speed on existing blockchain technologies is very slow. Bitcoin blockchain supports 1–3 tps whereas Visa supports 2000–10000 tps.

Latency : If Blockchain technologies have to carve a place in Fintech then they will have to improve the latency. One Block on Bitcoin blockchain needs 10 mins to process. In contrast, a Visa transaction gets confirmed in seconds.

There are solutions already coming up to solve these problems. There is BigchainDB, IOTA Tangle and many others. Even Hyperledger Fabric is much faster than Bitcoin blockchain.

The real question that needs to be asked is, how much resistance would Blockchain based technologies face from the Tech giants because it can potentially disrupt how Facebook and Google choose to sell our data and how a company like Netflix or Amazon Video serve us our content.